Final Fantasy VII: Remake First Gameplay Trailer Released

The PlayStation Experience event in the US gets bigger every year for Sony, and although there were no major new first party announcements there were plenty of brand new reveals – including a number of exclusive games for PlayStation VR. We’ve collected all the most important trailers below but Koei Tecmo’s Ni-Oh also looked surprisingly good, considering it’s by the creators of Dynasty Warriors.

The video showed the first gameplay scenes from the remake of the classic Final Fantasy game that fans have called the best in the long-running series, which has shipped more than 100 million units over time. Square also took to the stage to reveal that the HD edition of the original Final Fantasy VII (announced at last year’s PlayStation Experience) would be hitting PS4 today. And although the new King Of Fighter XIV looked rather disappointing there was the welcome news that classic SNK fighter The Last Blade 2 will be coming to PlayStation 4.

Majesco picked up the tab and paid for the game’s completion, but standing among the last big glut of uninspired mascot games, Psychonauts was initially lost. Also revealed was a new Sparrow racing mode in Destiny: The Taken King – which starts on December 8 and last for only three weeks. (Sparrows are the usually fairly superfluous speeder bike-like vehicles in the game.) On top of this was a mountain of indie game announcements, including Klei’s excellent Invisibile, Inc. and the co-op orientated Don’t Starve Together. Which option you chose in the demo, which showed protagonist Nate meeting up with his long lost brother, didn’t seem to make much difference, but perhaps that’s only something that will become apparent later in the game. After shocking the gaming world with the remake’s reveal at E3 in June, the trailer above shows the first fleeting glimpse of Final Fantasy VII’s revamp in action.

This week Schaefer and his creative team at Double Fine announced a new kind of crowdfunding: the website Fig, which unlike other sites promises a cut of the profits to any investor — and this means the fat slob in the stained T-shirt in North Dakota who contributes one dollar. And even though some of the trailer is just pre-rendered CGI it’s obvious that no expense is being spared, and that this really is a dream come true for fans. The game is as charmingly curious as it ever was, but now instead of settling down in front of a television for a lengthy play session, I can pull out my phone at any time and chip away at an epic adventure in little bits and pieces.

I’m completely clouded by nostalgia here—it’s unavoidable, and it makes the game’s enduring (and newly touch-centric) flaws easier to tolerate. Unrelated to the other core Final Fantasy games, VII follows Cloud, a young ex-soldier who bands together with rebels to take down the powerful Shinra company. The Capcom Cup tournament is also due to take place in San Francisco this weekend, as Sony continues to take Street Fighter V very seriously as an exclusive. There was only a brief mention of Psychonauts 2, but that’s because PlayStation VR is getting its own exclusive pre-sequel called Psychonauts: The Rhombus Of Ruin. Beyond exploring the environments, you’ll spend a lot of time in turn-based battles (now ideal for touch devices)—and mastering the smart, easy-to-learn Materia magic system and constantly upgrading your gear and abilities makes the eventually-tedious combat stay compelling.

Sony has been curiously quiet about this ‘re-imagining’ of the very first Ratchet & Clank, apparently because it’s a tie-in to an animated movie that keeps getting delayed. There’s enough variation in locations and enemy types that even repetitive actions take on a new tenor, plus the boss battles—particularly those found deep into the quest—are thrilling tests of tenacity and planning. The virtual buttons are messy and can obscure the action, while there’s no great choice between the virtual analog stick and directional pad for movement.

For us this was the biggest news of the night, and perhaps the spookiest example yet of Inbox magic – considering a reader was only asking about it on Friday, when we lamented that creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi seemed to have semi-retired. However, the game has been tweaked to be optionally more approachable for phone players: You can turn off random battles to quickly breeze through areas, as well as choose to maximize all player stats at any point if you just want to cruise through and enjoy the story.

And while needing to use save points to record your progress isn’t ideal for a mobile game, they appear frequently enough that a 15-minute gap in your day can probably be used to advance the storyline. Trying to recreate old pixel-based games in 3D has become relatively common recently, but we’ve never seen a game that handles the mix of old and new school like this.

The only thing we knew about this year’s PlayStation Experience ahead of time is that there’d be a lot about PlayStation VR, and indeed there was. Flying simulator Eagle Flight from Ubisoft looked particularly good, but there was also the surprisingly self-explanatory 100ft Robot Golf; the Crazy Taxi-esque The Modern Zombie Taxi Co.; unknown quantity Golem; and a promise of Namco combat flight sim Ace Combat 7. Another sequel we would’ve bet on never seeing, this is a brand new collaboration between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli (and so nothing to do with the Japanese-only DS game).